Squeezing Out The Bad Guys

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n Boston as in other cities, the joint ATF-police teams took a low-key approach. They asked a few questions and explained the new laws. They did not openly threaten dealers with investigation or prosecution, but the message was there. Of the city's 99 dealers, 82 voluntarily turned over their license or did not renew their application. "I think that tells you that bottom line, maybe they weren't complying," says Paul Evans, Boston's police commissioner. "They couldn't withstand the scrutiny, so they're out of business."

Nationwide, equally dramatic declines occurred. In 1993 Berkeley, Calif., had 34 licensed dealers; in 1996 it had two. Across the Bay, San Francisco knocked its population of dealers from 155 down to 10. Three-quarters of New York City's dealers gave up their licenses; so did 80% of Detroit's.

What effect this had on gun sales is unclear, but there is tantalizing evidence that the disappearance of these dealers contributed to a sharp reduction in handgun sales across America, particularly the cheap handguns sold by Lorcin and its peers in the Ring of Fire.

By law, manufacturers can sell guns only to licensed distributors, and they can sell them only to licensed dealers. Dealers, therefore, are the manufacturers' most important customers. Nationwide, 125,000 of those customers disappeared. Some dealers--like me--never bought or sold a single gun. Most of them probably sold only a few guns each year. Some sold hundreds, even thousands. The sudden shrinkage surely had an effect on sales and production. Says Andy Molchan, director of the National Association of Federally Licensed Firearms Dealers: "If you have 125,000 dealers who sell just four guns a year, how many guns is that?"

And the figures, though largely unreported by the mainstream press, are surprising. During the period of the sharpest decline in the number of dealers--between 1993 and 1996--overall U.S. pistol production fell nearly 60%, from 2.3 million to just under 1 million. Manufacturers of expensive, well-crafted guns reported only moderate decreases in production. Smith & Wesson, for example, actually saw its production of pistols rise more than 40% between 1993 and 1994, before its sales too began falling. Lorcin, by contrast, reported an immediate decline. In 1993 it produced 341,243 cheap pistols and became for that year the leading pistol producer in the U.S. In 1996 it manufactured only 87,497, a 74% reduction. Davis Industries, another maker of cheap pistols, experienced an equally precipitous fall.

No one can say whether the decline in dealers and handgun production had an effect on gunshot crime in America. During the same period, however--1993 through 1996--the nationwide total of violent crimes committed with firearms fell 20%, the total of handgun homicides 23%. And both rates have continued falling. In 1997, for the first time, the nation's homicide rate fell below that of 1968, the year that marked the initiation of America's three-decade dance with murder.

Other forces contributed. The nation's biggest cities, armed with new tracing data and new confidence that the flow of crime guns could be halted, launched campaigns to get guns off their streets. The Boston Gun Project quickly proved one of the most successful and became a source of hope for cities around the country.

With its initial studies completed, the project got under way in May 1996. Guided by tracing data, Boston police and ATF attacked the illegal-firearms market. "We were able to shut down about five different traffickers right off the bat," says Jeff Roehm, an ATF official who at the time ran the bureau's Boston field office.

The bulk of the project was devoted to interrupting a street dynamic in which a relatively small core of young, violent gang members had produced a climate of fear that drove gun acquisition. A team of police officers, prosecutors, federal agents and others began meeting with gang members, putting them on notice that henceforth violence by any single member would bring down a concentrated local, state and federal assault on the entire gang. That month, Boston's youth homicide rate began to plummet. The average monthly rate from May through November 1996 was 70% lower than the monthly average before the project began. From June 1996 through June last year, the city had seven months when not a single youth homicide occurred.

But the Boston Gun Project had a more far-reaching effect.

In 1995, as the research phase of the project was just starting, ATF was in the early stages of a post-Waco reorganization under a new director, John Magaw, who set trafficking as the bureau's primary strategic target. At about this time, Harvard's Kennedy and a Treasury Department official, Susan Ginsburg, began an extended conversation that prompted Ginsburg to lobby within Treasury, ATF's parent, for a national program of comprehensive gun tracing. She and ATF's tracing advocates envisioned tracing every single gun recovered by police in America's largest cities--a vision that resulted in Clinton's July 1996 launch of the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative--Yogi--which initially set out to trace every gun recovered in 17 major cities including Atlanta, St. Louis and New York.